|
Zombie Samurai posted:PMCs are fascinating to me as well because I have literally no idea why they exist in the US or why we have dealings with them. I have a hard time believing that with as much money as we spend on defense that we need to hire wildcard mercenaries to shore up our forces. And it's not like it helps our PR in any way whatsoever, with all the shady and despicable things that have come out about them. I don't even understand what kind of legal area they operate from. I don't have any hard figures at the moment to show it, but from my personal experiances like 99% of what PMCs do is run support services like chow halls and laundry and provide facility security (like no poo poo just security guards). There's some jobs which are far more dangerous which is where you see companies hiring up former special operations guys whom get given a dangerous job and jack poo poo for oversight (moving the mail around in country is an example, though I've never heard of those guys causing any incidents) but thats a small small minority of PMC activity. As to why? I don't know if it turns out to be true by I know the theory at least is that it takes a lot of money and time to train up new soldiers, even more so when you stand up new battalions and larger units, and it takes even longer to get rid of them when you don't need them anymore. The idea is that a temporary need is easier/cheaper to fill with a contractor because you don't have to pay to develop and maintain the organizational support or personal, and you can just contract them for exactly as long as you need them. This really should be the case, but with the corrupt as poo poo contracting practices I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if it doesn't end up that way at all.
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 09:51
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:22 |
|
|
You guys seems to not really understand how PMCs are utilized at all, they aren't mercs that are sent out to do the job soldiers are. The most offensive operations they ever did was acting as body guards for VIPs working for/with the state department (what blackwater was doing when it caused all its trouble).LowellDND posted:I also speculate that it allows you to run a quieter war. 10 soldiers die in Iraq, thats news, but a few mercenaries dying, thats just business. Yes that makes sense seeing as there was almost 4,500 US troop deaths in Iraq compared to 225 US PMC deaths.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 13:22
|
|
|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:You mean if you ignore everything run through intelligence services, right? I was under the impression they relied heavily on contractors for staffing. Based on what? And staffing for what?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 15:14
|
|
|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/us/20intel.html I don't know, because it wasn't? did you read those articles beyond the headlines? NY Times posted:Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. NPR posted:The program was scrapped before any missions were launched. The Atlantic posted:The reporting on Prado's activities at Blackwater produced no evidence that the firm's employees had ever killed anyone on behalf of the CIA LA Times posted:The program was kept secret from Congress for nearly eight years before Panetta told lawmakers about it in June. CIA officials have emphasized that the program was never operational and that it did not lead to the capture or killing of a single terrorism suspect.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 22:08
|
|
|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan quote:The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence. Yup that totally sounds like "common knowledge". Congrats you found an anonymous source claiming there's a super secret program where the CIA outsourced some of its blackest of black bag stuff... maybe. Its the same program that those 4 other sources you posted said never happened. This all has jack poo poo to do with "US running a mercenary war in Iraq".
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 23:22
|
|
|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:Yes, it's an anonymous source, but The Nation is not some rag. I actually listed a bunch of other poo poo contractors do besides security roles so that would be a weird assertion, I asked you "for doing what" in response to your first post as an honest question because I wasn't sure what capacity you were talking about and didn't want to say no in case you were referring to interrogations and non combat poo poo. I literally said in my first post on the subject they do a lot of supporting jobs. But go ahead and move the goal posts some more.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 23:48
|
|
|
ImAMinister posted:If you Google Blackwater, one of the first autocompletes is Blackwater Massacre Fallujah. Not many cooks and transportation specialists have the opportunity to do that. They were grabbed while providing security for a civilian convoy? edit: To be clear I mean civilian as in "not military" not "Iraqi civilians" (though the first couple articles don't go into detail on the convoy so they could have been Iraqi civilians being paid to transport something, which happens allot)
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 23:50
|
|
|
Willie Tomg posted:In that instance the mercs were the ones massacred. And its a shame you put that out there to get jumped on, because Blackwater is unbelievably loving sketchy and the GM of Iraq operations makes offhand jokes about killing state actors who could feasibly rein them in Oh agreed, I never meant to defend blackwater as a company or their personal, I was correcting the way people seem to have gotten an understanding of how contractors are used in Iraq/Afghanistan from playing Metal Gear Solid 4.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2014 23:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 04:22 |
|
|
AreWeDrunkYet posted:Do we really need to pull up the original quote? Yes? Non combat people get ambushed and killed all the time, sometimes they even work with combat people and get killed during fights. It was very clear what was being discussed, what I was referring to, and what I was correcting. now you're just trying to play pedantic games to try and produce a "gotcha" I mean gently caress you tried to spring "gotcha" on me when I asked for clarification but you didn't check your sources. quote:Yeah that's also real dumb (on their part) because there's a lot of room to be Really Concerned about how infrastructural contractors are employed by the pentagon before you even get to the layer of "oh, btw, some of these dudes are also unaccountable cowboys who murder with impunity" Even the most die hard war junkie Iraq invasion fanboy should be concerned about the mismanagement of the contracting issue. Its only anecdotal but the reputation I always heard about blackwater (including from guys working with different PMC groups) was that they were a bunch of assholes and they paid the best but the company didn't give a gently caress about you and just threw you into dangerous spots without care or support. This is exactly the type of the environment that breeds the "gently caress everything I'm gonna do whatever it takes" cowboy attitudes that are evidenced in their shenanigans.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2014 00:37
|
|